Speculative Computing and the Centers to Come by Bethany Nowviskie But the founding and sustaining and continual renewal of a DH center is itself an active form of hope for the future. And some of this future-orientation is not, itself, new. It stems from a long interest in History and other disciplines in counter-factualism, alternate imaginings, in […]
Beneath our cities lies vast, labyrinthine sewer systems. These have been key infrastructures allowing our cities to grow larger, grow more densely, and stay healthy. Yet, save for passing interests in Urban Exploration (UrbEx), we barely think of them as ‘beautifully designed systems’. In their time, the original sewer systems were critical long term projects […]
In recent months there has been a lot of talk about big stuff. Between ‘Big Data’ and calls for a return to ‘Longue durée’ history writing, lots of people seem to be trying to carve out their own small bit of ‘big data’. This post represents a reflection on what feels to me to be […]
The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) is an initiative by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to improve humanitarian action. The Summit, which is to be held in 2016, stands to be one of the most important humanitarian conferences in a decade. One key pillar of WHS is humanitarian innovation. “Transformation through Innovation” is the WHS Working Group dedicated to […]
Topic modeling is very popular at the moment in the digital humanities. A recent tutorial on getting started with this tool explains them as tools for extracting topics or injecting semantic meaning into vocabularies: “Topic models represent a family of computer programs that extract topics from texts. A topic to the computer is a list […]
The digital contexts of our scholarly practice impact not only the kind of work that we may do as humanists, but also how we represent changes in theory and methods over time. Whether we are preserving, analyzing, or representing cultural heritage collections, interpreting digital media, or communicating through open repositories or social media, our activities […]
That was the topic discussed recently by OCLC Research Library Partners metadata managers, initiated by Naun Chew of Cornell and Joan Swanekamp of Yale. As libraries have increased collecting commercial electronic resources, instituted local or shared digitization programs, and moved to cloud-based services, more bibliographic and inventory information is being managed outside the traditional catalog, […]
[This—more or less—is the text of a keynote talk I delivered last week in Atlanta, at the 2014 DLF Forum: the annual gathering of the Digital Library Federation. DLF is one among several stellar programs at CLIR, the Council on Library and Information Resources, where I have the honor to serve as a Distinguished Presidential […]
The 21st century will be the century of temperature. As global temperatures rise, polar ice melts, and drought becomes a permanent way of life, temperature has become the single greatest challenge to human life on the planet. Temperature is also a media problem in many ways: from the heat generated by new media—whether in our […]
In all the GamerGate stories, an interesting move by Newsweek as to commission a study of GamerGate tweets. Taylor Wofford reported about the results in an article from October 25th, 2014 that is titled, Is GamerGate About Media Ethics or Harassing Women? Harassment, the Data Shows. The study was run by BrandWatch and they looked at […]
